I
can't shake the feeling that each of the romantic leads of No
Strings Attached would be better off without the other. She's as eager to define a non-relationship as he is to define the
relationship they both protest (too much) does not exist between them. He's a nice guy with a "good heart" (so says everyone), while
she has baggage—not the cute kind, either.

It's
an unfairly loaded movie in more ways than it can recognize. The premise of their romantic relationship as an unromantic
non-relationship, as evoked by the title, is that two people can make dates to
rendezvous for sexual encounters without dating while still remaining friends,
and whatever argument one wants to make for or against through experience or
hypothetical debate is useless. This
is, after all, a romantic comedy, try as hard as it might to dash to pieces such
a fluffy term suggesting idealistic love.

He
is Adam (Ashton Kutcher), a blank slate mixture of frat-boy partier and hopeless
romantic with dreams of writing for a television sitcom set in a high school
where the students break out into musical numbers (That's the spirit; don't aim
too high, sport). She is Emma
(Natalie Portman), a straight-laced young woman with dreams of being a doctor. They meet repeatedly over a span of fifteen years, and since she mildly
consoles him twice in that time period of sporadic, chance encounters (and
really only for that), Adam decides Emma is the One.

Emma
probably believes the same about him, because (and really only because) he calls
her up for some revenge sex after his current girlfriend (Ophelia Lovibond)
leaves him for his father Alvin (Kevin Kline), star of a famous sitcom (who has
cursed his son by unintentionally encouraging people to shout dad's catchphrase
of "Great Scott" every time they find out who he is). They don't have sex after the drunken dialing, but after she
uncomfortably puts her arm around him and he thankfully touches her leg, they
get down to business, staring into each other's eyes with the fluffy look of
idealistic love.

Enter
Indecisive Emma, an off-putting variation of Emma who is gung-ho to be unhappy
and necessary, in the grandly obnoxious genre tradition, to keep the two of them
apart. Her logic is that she becomes
a warped, evil version of herself when she's in a relationship and wants to
avoid the—in her mind—inevitable heartbreak that will come when Adam
realizes this.

Instead,
she becomes, in the screenplay by Elizabeth Meriwether, a warped, evil version
of herself that plays with the feelings of poor, old, indefinably bland Adam,
texting and calling him at all hours of the day and night, acting like they're
in a relationship but saying they're not. Adam
could grow a pair, but he's just too boringly, indescribably nice to slam on the
brakes.

There
is, naturally, a reason for their respective behavior. Adam comes from a broken home and is just so darn sensitive, and Emma,
her mother (Talia Balsam) theorizes just in time for her big, revelatory shift
toward a false resolution, is simply in the habit of trying to stay strong for
her family after her father's death. That
scene plays far more manipulatively than it sounds.

Surrounding
these two is a cast of paper-thin supporters. Emma has two female roommates (Greta Gerwig and Mindy Kaling), who are
only there so Emma can realize she's miserably alone, and a gay roommate (Guy
Branum) the movie forgets about until it can make a joke about the fact he's gay.
The other women do set up the
movie's best joke, involving a mix CD Adam burns to celebrate and console them
during their shared menstrual cycles (It's in the song titles, not the setup). Adam's buddies fare a bit better: Wallace (Chris "Ludacris"
Bridges) points out the obvious, and Eli (Jake Johnson) introduces himself as
though he's pitching a sitcom about his "two, gay dads."

No
Strings Attached
starts down an intriguing path in its extended epilogue that teases at the
prospect of an unfulfilled (or, as it would be called, a happy) end for Adam and
Emma's never-burgeoning non-but-it-actually-is-a-relationship, until a contrived
phone call and hospital visit have to ruin it for them. Then again, this is a movie that ends on a rhetorical question only to
answer it mere seconds later with a cheery montage during the credits.